Hi everyone,
first of all excuse the cross-posting but this subject supposedly is of
wider interest. Replies can probably be kept to -events.eu.
A rather small team of enthusiastic Free Software contributors has met
quite a few times during the last weeks (admittedly with low direct
Debian involvement). There are people from sidux (a sid based distro)
and Skolelinux who Debian has been working with closely when possible
over years already. Also members of LinuxTag e.V. (the association that
organizes the LinuxTag in Berlin) are part of the group.
The goal was to come up with a concept for a mini-debconf in Berlin
during the LinuxTag in June 9th to 12th. And we can now say, there is
one. Unfortunately it's not as promising as we hoped it would be which
means: we need you!
Right now we're at about this:
Calculated costs: € 6.000
Promised sponsors: € 1.200
Additionally Steve told us Debian would give € 2.000 if needed. Of
course we would like to avoid that.
As usual a lot can be gained by self-organized materials and sponsored
or lent equipment, like beamer, audio/video stuff, network
installation...
When we first sent out the idea of having a minidebconf in Berlin there
were several DDs who supported it. As a matter of fact, to the meetings
and online discussions only two of them ever showed up. Other
contributors showed interest in it but actually, right now we need more
than a "sounds cool, would be fun" -- we need real support.
This is supposed to be a big opportunity for us (at least all of us who
live in and around Germany but of course everyone is invited) and to
Debian wrt publicity. The LinuxTag has during its four days round about
10,000 visitors. There are various distributions of Free Software
projects that exchange ideas and comments.
Following our current concept we would use two days in the middle of the
event having our own Debian area (additionally to the Debian booth at
LinuxTag itself) where we can have talks and BOFs about various aspects
of Debian. Those can be (and we think that would be great) interesting
to DDs as well as visitors. In another room we would have space to
work, possibly having a public bug squashing party and thus actively
working on the release and have interested people take part in it. We
are in freeze by then, right?
But to make all this happen, there is still a lot to do. Are you -- no
-- are we willing to take that chance? Since we're bound to contracts,
we need to decide ASAP, this weekend actually. So, if you know where to
get money or equipment, if you think you can come and help installing
the hardware (video, stage whatever), if you want to talk about anything
in Debian (German preferred but a few english talks would be cool, too),
or if you just have ideas what to talk about (and have possible
candidates to do so), this is YOUR time to step up.
We'd like to make things happen, but it's a miniDEBconf, so... Debian?
Hauke
on behalf of the team